Measuring people's happiness from words on Twitter What is understood by 'hedonometer'?

by Artem Bali

" Hedonometer " is a word that refers to "a device that measures happiness and pleasure", it is said that in 1881, British economist Francis Isidro Edgeworth first used it. The research team at Vermont University analyzes the words written on Twitter and creates and publishes a hedonometer that measures the happiness level of the group.

Hedonometer
http://hedonometer.org/index.html

Hedonometer About
http://hedonometer.org/about.html

Research teams such as Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth who are conducting research on happiness and cognition at the University of Vermont said, "Everyone wants happiness, but understanding can not be done if happiness can not be measured We can not improve it, "he invented a hedonometer which measures happiness in real time.

In order to quantify the happiness that appears in the language, the research team first extracts a total of 10,000 words, frequently appearing words and unique words from corpus such as Google Books , New York Times articles, music lyrics, Twitter writing did. And using Amazon Mechanical Turk service to collect collaborators, they asked me to judge how happy each word feels in 1 to 9 stages, and measured the "happiness degree" of each word.

The degree of happiness for each word can be confirmed on the following page. You can see that the word "laughter" "happiness" "love" "happy" is judged to be a word with high happiness.

Hedonometer words page

Hedonometer measures the degree of happiness based on about 100 million words per day collected randomly from writing on Twitter based on the word happiness degree thus collected, and what emotions people of the day feel Whether it was holding a graph or not.

The hedonometer published by the research team is like this. Multicolored points are represented by line graphs.

The color of the point represents the day of the week, and on the right side the number of happiness is displayed. At the bottom of the graph, the meter indicating the day was displayed.

By adjusting the display period range at the bottom, you can change the period of the graph to be displayed.

When you display the period from November 2018 to the end of 2019 lots, the graph is much clearer. If you move the cursor to the point of the graph, you can see the breakdown of what happened and what happened on that day. When you move the cursor to the day of highest happiness among the graphs displayed on the trial ......

I understood that this day was December 25, 2018, that is, it was Christmas day. Words of high happiness such as "christmas" "merry" "happy" are frequently murmured, and these words seem to boost the happiness of the day.

Conversely, if you examine the day with the lowest happiness in the period, the annotation is "gun shot at the Thousand Oaks bar". It was a bar at Thousand Oaks outskirts of California this day, it seems that it was a day when former Marine gun shooting incident occurred.

Looking at the breakdown, negative words such as "shooting" "pain" "gun" "killed" "steal" "violence" "guns" "victims" were lined up.

When we looked at the period for the most recent year, we found that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were the two most happy days of the year. On the other hand, on the day when the happiness level is low, a gun shooting incident has occurred with a considerable probability, and February 14, 2018, when the happiness level became the lowest in one year, was a disaster in which 17 students and 17 faculty members died It was the day Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school gun shooting incident occurred.

Looking further for a long period of time, Christmas is again the most happy day in all the years. Meanwhile, when major disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, or when a terrible incidents such as the Boston marathon bombing terrorist attacks and gun shooting occurred, the degree of happiness seems to decrease greatly. The lowest level of happiness during the period is the day when the Las Vegas Strike Shooting Shooting Incident occurred in 2017 and the day when Michael Jackson died or the day Donald Trump was elected president Even the happiness degree has decreased greatly.

About Twitter as a source of happiness measurement data, the research team says "Twitter tweets record the utterances of uneven people and it is a very important social topic that hundreds of millions of people use It can be a signal. "